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Harper’s Newspeak

Harper’s Newspeak

He loves naming laws with false slogans. (So do fascists.)

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Newspeak: ‘An impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.’ Photo source: Stephen Harper Flickr.


In 1995 the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, wrote an essay on the eternal threat of fascism for the New York Review of Books.

Eco explained that fascism, like any totalitarian system, depended on certain features to poison the political landscape.

It could sprout, warned Eco, like an invasive weed in any place where careless citizens let liberty erode.

To Eco the central ingredients of eternal fascism included a cult of heroism; an irrational worship of technology; a faith in action and action plans (politics as permanent warfare); a fear of difference (all fascist governments are racist); leadership that bullies the masses; an obsession over some kind of international plot (such as ISIS taking over the world) and a belief that parliamentary government is rotten to the core.

A fascist government also bent plain language into Newspeakto converse with the people. Whether engineered by socialists, capitalists or dictators, all Newspeak, noted Eco, must make “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” In essence, fascism suspends thinking with lies and false language.

George Orwell understood that political chaos danced with the decay of language and that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murders respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Just about every modern institution and political party employs Newspeak to one degree or another. Many U.S. universities have become experts at closing minds with deceptive language.One notorious university library guideadvised students that the rich are really “people of material wealth” and the obese are “people of size.”

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